The above-referenced parent patent application discloses a digital video recorder which has intelligent video information management capabilities.
In any digital video recording apparatus, the large quantity of data inherently present in streams of video signals tends to require difficult trade-offs to be made between the storage capacity to be provided by the apparatus and the image quality to be available upon reproduction of the recorded video signals. The trade-offs can be particularly critical when it is desired to provide random access to the recorded video signal, as is the case in the intelligent video information management (IVIM) recorder disclosed in the parent patent application. In a preferred embodiment of the IVIM recorder, recording of video signal streams generated by up to 16 cameras, with random access playback, is provided on one or more hard disk drives. To achieve an adequate recording duration on the hard disk drives, a number of compression strategies were proposed in the parent patent application.
The present inventors have developed additional features related to the compression strategies disclosed in the parent patent application so as to provide more efficient utilization of data storage capacity and/or improved image quality, albeit with requirements for additional processing during compression-encoding operations.